STIR THE POTS

Lots of cooking to be done! (Bah humbug!)

It's a wonder I have time to write when I have so much work coming up this next month, actually it's been rather busy at work with or without the holiday. So if I start being quiet you can be assured that I am in the trenches cooking and trying to get the next 21 day's of holiday madness past me! I will try to snap a few pics  maybe of food or whatever if I can get a knife or utensil out of my hand long enough!
Happy holiday's! (Whatever!)

Cooking for the Bethesda crew!

Just loafing around!

Yesterday I nourished my starving stock levain in my fridge and was anxious to bake some loaves, but I knew I would have to make a yeasted or poolished loaf to await the levains bubbling and so I decided on a baguette. I chose for my sourdough a loaf from Dan Lepard's book The handmade loaf, the Mill loaf to be exact. Being the lazy baker I had never successfully made this particular formula, most likely not paying attention to how or if I was feeding my levain's . So I nourished my stock levain with a good quantity of flour and water  to make  two huge  loaves about 1000g's each.Dan suggests trying other flours in the mix of this loaf so I added a small amount of my naked barley I picked up in Wales last august. Lazy baker that I am I tried to heed Dans really easy instructions for the loaves, this meant feeding my starter when I did would have me wake up at about 2:30 in the morning!Just like a real boulanger, just that I didn't set my clock!  With a few glasses of wine in me  I fell asleep early and miraculously woke up exactly at the appointed time to hand knead both doughs and had bread on the breakfast table too boot! Pick up the book and try his awesome recipes, as well his British baking book which I hope is printing so I can get a copy!

Basta tacchino

Ok enough leftovers, stuffing, turkey and pies! Two days of leftovers can be sort of a broken record,even if the food was good! I have to say I was pleased with our dinner this Thanksgiving, though I didn't take pictures of the  turkey, just too busy wolfing  beausoleil's oysters with mignonette and washed down by a  Vetliner! Thanksgiving is  a dysfunctional meal with my family,I am sure were not the only ones! Trying to get my brother to cook instead of watching football games. my mom running into the kitchen doing something to pick up after my brother and me while we growled our discontent trying to shoo her away!
Finally we got to the table, carved the bird and popped the corks on numerous wines finally making a toast or two then chowed! My brother showed a real professional streak when doing his best sommelier show!
Thanksgiving is my favorite meal for sure, this years was no exception and well see you all next year!

Thanksgiving menu

As I schlepped my turkey and oysters from work onto a crowded city bus the driver suspiciously looked at my plastic box with duck tape handle and said, "whaddya got in dare?" "Oysters," I replied! Jeezus it's thanksgiving dude!

To say this is my favorite holiday is an understatement; it's not that it celebrates the gathering of the Pilgrims and the unfortunate Indians
who invited them to share in their harvest. No it's the actual act of preparing a meal that as a young child I recalled having come from Europe, where they celebrate eating and sitting at the table as a ritual. Times sure have changed; we don't sit and talk or eat well for that matter. People are not spending quality time at anything really; no one wants to sacrifice time to make something that will feed your soul as well as the body. Food nurtures us and yet we don't really take time to see where it comes from, how it grows. I think there are some optimistic signs, green markets, organic are just some of the good things we can see coming back. Somehow were realizing that our way of living depends solely on how we are treating the planet we call home!

Over the weekend I will have some days off to cook, what else? Right now I have my gizzards confiting on the fire for my stuffing, my levain, liquide and stiff are both rising for some rolls or whatever I fancy to make!

This holiday I think is the best food related for me, no gifts, no singing, unless of course it's Alice's Restaurant! Just good old turkey, stuffing and all them fixins!

The menu for Thanksgiving 2007

Wellfeet and Beausoleil oysters, with a mignonette sauce

Roasted turkey with our traditional gizzard confit and mixed rice stuffing

Parsnip puree, sweet potato and ginger puree, haricot vert and chantrelles

Cranberry sauce,of course!

Pies
Pecan
Pumpkin
and apple (French style this year!)

And plenty of wine and good company!

Stay tuned for snaps later!

Happy Holiday!

 

Dagwood Sandwich Sunday

Sunday is the day of rest,watch a good episode of Colameco wash laundry etc... So this particular day I had a lunch that seemed appropriate since my fridge was empty and my wife was kicking back while I attended to chores.
My hugely successful levain I made the other day was a great place to start layering what was just laying around, gravlax my wife picked up for me at Ikea! Some tomatoes, lettuce,red onions, avocado and some Italian butter. Dagwood is a cartoon character and he likes sandwiches that resemble buildings, layers of different ingredients stuffed between two pieces of bread an almost vertical but yet horizontal tower of good eats! Washed down with a nice lager, can't be beat!

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Teachers levain

About 10 years ago I took a class at my Alma mater, FCI for a bread course. The teachers we had were two different personalities, Nick Greco an Italian-American baker who was very hands on with stories of his fathers baking in the Arthur Ave. bakeries. David Norman, a bookish baker who was self taught and was a student of German language as well as bread, he drilled us with bakers percents, rolling his eye's as we looked at his bakers cross as if it was an algebra exercise!
So this last week being the final deluge of dinners and events before Thanksgiving at my workplace. I tried fruitlessly to bake some loaves, most landing in the garbage, I know I probably should save them as soakers for new breads! (noted).
Feeling that either I had lost my touch or the levain was putrid, I dug through my files when I found an old e-mail from Nick who I would pester about formulas, this was years after the class had already ended! Nick was very busy but kindly sent me a formula, I haven't heard from or of him since. David is in Texas with his author wife Paula Disbrowe living on a farm!
Both of these bakers shaped the way I followed my home baking career and I wanted to thank them for their patience and advice, though admittedly I still am a lazy baker, my shaping somewhat unorthodox, slashing technique getting better and most of all my love of baking increasing like a bubbling levain!

Levain Greco

Levain
First feed:
6g starter
12g water
12g water

Second feeding:
29g Levain
29g water
29g flour

Final Dough:
87 g levain
346g Bread Flour
52g rye
52g whole wheat
10g salt
288g water

I being "The lazy baker" will tell you I left the bread to rise about 2.5 to 3 hours with folds inbetween, I think it was two total, shaped the loaf and put it into a rye dusted banneton, let it sit at room temp, (actually in the oven since it was so bloody chilly last nite, then covered and into the fridge overnight!
Baked at about 450F
Et voila!

Henf linseed ficelle

100% levain ficelle with linseeds and henf (hemp seeds), sure I admit Nils at his best turned me on.Since my recent rye was a disaster and I dropped some hemp into it I wondered if the poor loaf was effected by this seed?

I was in the mood to make some baguettes and found a recipe on a French baking site, the size of the recipe was for about 20 bags at 380 g, I did some mental arithmetic and reduced the size of the formula and substituted T80 flour with white whole wheat for the poolish, I also used my levain to inoculate it rather than commercial yeast. Ever the lazy baker I didn't spend time notating just did the feel it and bake it? Que sera,sera?

Quark, slight return.....

Quark? My boss asks as he looks at the menu I offer him for a dinner party.He assumes it's a computer program or some foreign substance he can't pronounce so I educate him to the fact that there is a German cheese that makes a sublime tasting cheesecake instead of the usual cream cheese ! Rather than doing a bread and butter pudding, which although is rather delicious too I have a hankering for my sisters recipe I tasted a couple times. She incorporates seasonal fruits like rhubarb, currants or even raspberries. This version is from Dr. Oeteker's book, though it reminds me a lot of the version my sister makes  I didn't reproduce hers, as she had some processed pudding or custard in it, where will I find that in my pantry? Instead I use the basic stock of pantry items in most classic cheese cakes, eggs, sugar, cheese, starch or flour etc... Though I love a New York style cheese cake, I have a real affinity for  that German style that are lightened  with egg whites, less rich but still satisfying none the less!

Dough:

150 g A.P. flour

1/2 teaspoon Baking powder

75 gSugar

2-3 teaspoons Vanilla sugar

pinch of salt

1 Egg

75 g Butter

Filling:

750 g Quark

150 g Sugar

3 tsp lemon juice   

50 g Corn starch

4 eggs seperated

200ml Heavy cream

Mix flour with baking powder,add sugar, vanilla sugar, a dash of salt, egg and  soft butter. Mix these ingredients and knead until you get a soft dough. If it is too sticky, put it in the fridge  until firm.

Take 2/3 of the dough and roll it out on the bottom of a 10 inch spring form pan (diameter 28 cm). Knead 1 tablespoon of flour into the remaining dough and form a rim. Pierce several times with a fork.

Put this into the preheated oven at 200-220°C - 400 F for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix  Quark with  sugar, lemon juice and  starch. Beat the whites of four eggs, mix the four yolks, beat 200 ml cream into the Quark, folding the egg whites at the end.

Spread the Quark evenly on the pre-baked dough and put into the oven for 70 to 80 minutes at 170°C. 325 F

After the cake is done, it should be left in the oven for about 20 minutes with the door ajar and the heat turned off. Cool on rack.

 

Nina's simple rye, only if your Nina!

The final loaf in my Marathon day trio was a two day bread which I previously made with some success but not as wonderful as the original I tasted in Wales at Bethesdabakin.  Nina who baked it is a co-forum member of both Graham Prichard's Oz site as well as Dan Lepards ,let me tell you she can bake a mean rye loaf! Not an easy feat for us wheat bread bakers, my next challenge will be to conquer spelt, but that is another post! Nina has a loaf called a simple Danish rye, it has a deep taste that is so delicious, but upping my ante I added in some grains, hemp (Nils!) and some beer instead of all water to make some mini loafs! Sorry haven't cut it yet for a crumb shot,it is  just out of the oven and Nina suggest letting it rest 24 to 48 hours to set the rye crumb. That being the case I can only enjoy feeling it's light rather than usual brick weight which is sometimes the case when trying to make a rye at 100%. Right now I can only admire the fork tine marks that I docked on the chestnut brown loaf, some of the seeds sticking out from mini loaf.

Tak Nina! (Note: Loaf looked great till I sliced it, it had a little open top and looked as if it didn't rise a bit? Hmmm, waiting for a message from Nina!)

Marathon bagman

So it's marathon weekend in New York,I thought I would do my bit and  marathon by baking several loaves. Not exactly exercise I admit but a challenge!
This baguette aux levain is one I tried shaping like a etoile, (star) but when I peeled it onto the stone it fell apart and looked like a baked marathoner with three legs instead, taste though was fabulous! A bit of crotin did it justice, then some delicious sheep cheese with espelette! We ate the whole thing, even the wife liked it!